Kanbun 漢文

Subject: "North American Kanbun Studies?" -->  "Kanbun"

Discussant topic raised by: Robert Borgen

Participants: Anthony Bryan, Jacques Joly, Michael Pye, Lawrence Marceau, Aldo Tollini, Tim Kern, David Pollack, Ivo Smits, Aileen Gatten, David Lurie, Frederic J. Kotas, David Eason, Thomas Howell, Richard Bowring, Nobumi Iyanaga, Judith Froelich, Thomas Howell, Kristina Troost, I.J.Parker, James McMullen, Rein Raud, Paul Rouzer, Sean Somers, James Unger, Michael Watson

Earlier "public archives" on pmjs left out email addresses altogether to protect members' privacy. In this archive, the username to the left of the @ mark has been automatically omitted. Full addresses are given in the members' only logs [2006 3nd quarter | logs index]. 
A few links to publishers' and booksellers' pages have been added by the editor. <watson[at]k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>



From: Robert Borgen <-----@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 10, 2006 0:28:28 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  North American Kanbun Studies?

As some of you may know, Nisho Gakusha University has gotten a COE grant for "Establishment of World Organization for Kanbun Studies."  You can learn about it on their website (http://www.nishogakusha-coe.net/).  As part of the project, in September, they will be holding an conference in Hangzhou and have asked me to report on any developments in North America during the past year relating to kanbun studies.  I can think of two summer language programs, those at Columbia and University of Southern California, and two books, Dance of the Butterflies, by Judith Rabinovitch and Timothy Bradstock (although it may be a bit more than a year old) and Haruo Shirane's new anthology of early Japanese literature (although it may not yet be out by the time of the conference).  I assume I've missed things, such as recent dissertations and articles published in books or journals that escaped my my attention.  If you know of anything I've overlooked or have a project you'd like mentioned, please let me know.

Robert Borgen

From: Anthony Bryant <-----@cox.net>
Date: July 10, 2006 2:32:49 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

This reminds me of something I keep wanting to ask here.

Has anyone used Komai & Rohlich's An Introduction to Japanese Kanbun? I've been wanting to use it as a sort of "teach yourself kanbun" text, but the book suffers from the lack of a key to the exercises in it. I'm hoping that someone out there might have put one together.

Tony
--
Anthony J. Bryant
Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com

All sorts of cool things Japanese and SCA:
http://www.cafepress.com/sengokudaimyo

From: "M.Joly Jacques" <-----@free.fr>
Date: July 13, 2006 8:13:43 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

One complementary note :
for French reading people, the best introduction to Kanbun may be  Jean-Noel Robert's Lectures Elémentaires en style sino-japonais, Université Paris 7 , 1986. It is not a really published work so you must ask the Dept of LCAO in the University itself if they ahve some remaining copies.
Jacques Joly


From: Anthony Bryant <-----@cox.net>
Date: July 13, 2006 4:03:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

M.Joly Jacques wrote:
... for French reading people, the best introduction to Kanbun may be  Jean-Noel Robert's Lectures Elémentaires en style sino-japonais...

Thank you. I'll get in touch with them.

(Am I the only one who's used Japanese high school textbooks to get up to speed with bungo and kanbun?)

Tony
--

Anthony J. Bryant
Website: http://www.sengokudaimyo.com

All sorts of cool things Japanese and SCA:
http://www.cafepress.com/sengokudaimyo

From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 13, 2006 6:44:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

Anthony Bryant wrote:
(Am I the only one who's used Japanese high school textbooks to get
up to speed with bungo and kanbun?)

Well anyway, not quite. When teaching in a high school in the early sixties I
went along to the kanbun class and found it quite useful. It was interesting
not only (a) to learn the Chinese itself (in a certain way...) but also (b) to
puzzle out what Japanese teachers and pupils were doing with it. Iused the
textbooks a bit by myself, but it was more interesting to go to the class and
see fifty sixteen year olds wrestling with it.

Since that time I have often dreamed of a kakikudashi system for putting Latin
into a kind of basic English grammar. This would make Latin texts available to readers of English, making the sometimes apparently tortuous grammar
transparent, while keeping the basic vocabulary. This idea never found any
takers (yet) but at least it's a way of explaining what "kanbun" is insofar as
it isn't just quite the same as "Chinese prose" any more.

I have some questions.

1) Am I correct in thinking that (in Japan) the only Chinese texts read in the Chinese order of the characters are the Buddhist sutras in so far as recited? This has always been my simple assumption, but am I missing some interesting corner here?

2) Was this (if true) always the case? I have long been tortured with worry about how eighteenth century writers of kanbun actually thought of what they were writing, in their heads. If there was a time when literati thought (sometimes) in the Chinese order, when did it start and stop?

3) Can it be that there is some truth in the adage ascribed to the Sage:
"The true Gentleman trains his hand with the characters determined by
Above, but does not actually pronounce them." ?

Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan


From: Lawrence Marceau <------@auckland.ac.nz>
Date: July 13, 2006 10:15:46 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

At the EMJNet meeting in conjunction with AAS in San Francisco this past April, one of the panels dealt with Kanshibun.  Hopefully one or more of these presentations is going to be expanded and submitted to a journal in the near future, if not already.

**************************************

Panel 2: Writing Japan, China, and the World: Kanshi Poets in the
Nineteenth Century

Organizer: Paul Rouzer, University of Minnesota

Discussant: Ivo Smits, Leiden University

This panel centers on Japanese poetry in literary Chinese (usually
termed kanshi) during the 19th century, to demonstrate its vitality as
well as cultural and social relevance. Kanshi underwent a tremendous
revival during this time, as several generations of samurai authors,
combining a sophisticated education in both the Chinese and Japanese
classics with an expanding curiosity about the world, brought literary
Chinese composition to a new level of native expression. For them, the
use of literary Chinese was not merely a schoolbook exercise. Rather,
they used the language to voice their own distinctive needs: for
personal self-expression and for political engagement with the turbulent
period that saw the decline of the bakufu, the discovery of the Western
world, and the changes of the Meiji era. A full understanding of 19th
century kanshi requires a reading that straddles disciplines and borders
one that is sensitive to both Chinese and Japanese literary conventions,
and one that can locate poetic composition within the nexus of social
and political change without reducing it to an epiphenomenon of those
changes.

Panelists see continuities over a period of volatile discontinuity, as
poets confront the challenge of articulating new subject matter within
the restrictions of Chinese form, from Rai San’yo’s (1781-1832)
exploration of the Dutch presence at Nagasaki, to Ryuhoku’s (1837-1884)
attempts to articulate political courses of action, to Mori Ogai’s
(1862-1922) personal mediation of a Chinese heritage.

1. Rai San’yo’s Nagasaki Poems: Domesticating (Sinicizing) the West

Paul Rouzer, University of Minnesota

During 1818 and 1819, Rai San’yo’s (1781-1832), the most prominent
kanshibun author of his generation, took a tour of western Honshu and
Kyushu, where he wrote over 270 poems. One of the most striking aspects of this trip involves the verses he wrote in Nagasaki, where he made contact with local intellectuals, visited members of the Chinese
merchant community, and described the Dutch legation. These works bring up one of the most interesting issues surrounding modern kanshi
composition: how does one employ the conventions and imagery of
traditional Chinese poetry to speak about the alien and the modern?

This paper discusses two approaches San’yo took in writing about the
West. First, by relying on the Chinese convention of capturing scene
through the humor and irony implicit in the quatrain form, San’yo
created a series of aesthetic vignettes (not unlike similar poems he
wrote on paintings, for example) that distances the author from the
effects of the alien; framing allows for the incorporation of the
picturesque and the exotic. Second, San’yo expanded his vision through
the use of narrative /gafu/ (C: /yuefu/), in this case, through a long
ballad on the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. San’yo had already become
famous for his /gafu/ ballads on the Genpei and Taiheiki conflicts,
where he used Chinese rhetoric, with conventions rooted in Confucian
historical judgment, to create a detailed historiography. Here, he plays
out his narrative of Napoleon against the classic Sino-Japanese
narrative of imperial hubris: the rise and fall of the first Qin emperor.

2. Stones from other hills: a Japanese Confucian encounters the West

Matthew Fraleigh, Harvard University

The arrival of Western warships at Japan’s shores in the mid-nineteenth
century brought not only a diplomatic crisis for the Tokugawa shogunate, but also presented popular new topoi for Japanese kanshi poets. In the proliferation of /kanshi/ written in response to the incursion, authors drew on classical Chinese precedents and the domestic kanshi tradition both to depict the unfamiliar and also to articulate a variety of
possible courses of action. Because these poets attended gatherings
where they shared their works, received feedback on them, and composed works collaboratively, such poems in classical Chinese served as an important medium for the exchange of ideas.

This paper focuses on the dramatic shifts in representations of the West
evident in the poems of Narushima Ryuhoku (1837-1884), a Confucian
scholar in the employ of the Tokugawa shogunate. Whereas Ryuhoku’s
earliest poetic journals contain several works that feature fantastic
scenes of cataclysmic rebuff, his later works evince an eclectic
curiosity about the West. An examination of Ryuhoku’s extant poetic
manuscripts offers the chance to see how Ryuhoku’s poetic seniors
commented upon his poems, what standards were used to select poems for later anthologies, and how Ryuhoku himself revised his earlier poems to reflect his evolving views. I also look at the works of other prominent
Edo poets with whom Ryuhoku was associating, such as Onuma Chinzan and Otsuki Bankei, in order to illustrate the diversity of responses to Perry’s arrival and to suggest the importance of kanshi as a mode of literary exchange.

3. Mori Ogai (1862-1922) and kanshi: mediating traditions

John Timothy Wixted

Mori Ogai’s mediation between Japan and the prime cultural legacy of
China (its writing system, in this case in the form of Sino-Japanese
kanshi poetry) was to be paralleled by his mediation between Germany and Japan (through translation activity, the writing of his most famous
short stories, and other cultural undertakings prompted by the West).
Mediation, in Ogai’s case, is both more personal and more general than
might at first appear, referring to apprenticeship, the acquisition of
skills, personal display (in particular evidence in his kanshi),
maturation, and the forging of an identity both personal and national.

    Best,

    Lawrence Marceau


From: "tollini" <-----@unive.it>
Date: July 13, 2006 15:41:37 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

A short notation to Michael Pye's "dream" for kakikudashi system for Latin.

It wouldn't be strange at all!

In the late Edo period and in the early Meiji period there were attempts to put the Dutch and later the English language in kakikudashi in order to study those languages. In other words, there was the idea that just like Chinese, the general method for studying foreign languages was by means of kanbun kundoku. For example this is the case with Dutch in Rangaku kei [蘭学逕] by  Fujibayashi Fuzan 藤林普山 of 1810.

Aldo Tollini
Venice


As the original kanji did not survive transmission, Webcat was used to find the correct characters. The full title of "Rangaku kei" is given as 譯鍵 附蘭学逕. /ed

From: Tim Kern <-----@nichibun.ac.jp>
Date: July 13, 2006 17:18:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?


Sorry for this end of the day (for me) comment to Aldo Tollini's point. the Japanese still do this when they read English. I don't know but maybe Italian or any other language too. especially those who had formal kanbun kyoiku. You can often see or feel it when you read a Japanese translation of an English text, especially before it gets polished up. (We are probably doing something similar when we read Japanese as well). I particularly find it among Japanese academics (with a strong classical training) who write a paper or even when they try to present something in English. I used to wonder why there were repeated patterns of, what to a native speaker were strange (not necessarily wrong), wording. One time in a graduate seminar I realized my sempai were using kakikudashi to read an English translation of an Edo text (I think it was Sorai), they would go back to the original and wonder why the English translation didn't necessarily follow the standard kanbun reading. It was hard to convince them that it was not "good" English, because the counter to me was that it was not "acurate." These discussions
lasted late into the second sessions at the izakaya.
tim kern
Kyoto

--------------------------------------------------
From: "pollack" <-----@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 13, 2006 19:45:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

Isn't this pretty much what all those generations of suffering 19th century
English schoolboys did when they were made to "construe" Latin? I gather from novels that this particular variety of hell was carried out in a quite rigidly formulaic manner. Aside from the relative few in those days who might have had reason actually to communicate in Latin, most likely within the Church, I suspect that even something as familiar as the Latin mass would have sounded to the majority of the population much like the Japanese bouyomi reading of Buddhist sutras to most Japanese, a vaguely comforting and traditional drone whose actual meaning could safely be left to the anointed. I further suspect that sutra-reading as performed in Chinese temples might well have had the same effect on Chinese ears.

David Pollack
University of Rochester


From: Ivo Smits <-----@let.leidenuniv.nl>
Date: July 13, 2006 23:31:26 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

Dear all

    Completely off track, but this reminds me of an academic myth here in Leiden, where until at least the middle of the nineteenth century classes were taught in Latin.
    One day during lecture a student came in late for class and forgot to close the door behind him. The professor said, in Latin, "close the door". No one reacted; all students simply went on taking notes. What this (apocryphal?) story was supposed to illustrate is that no one in the class room had any idea of what was being said, but wrote down, verbatim, whatever they heard the professor say, and only later would translate their notes into something intelligible.
    I suppose what the story taught is that academic education was (still is, sometimes?) mostly a ritual, not a meaningful exchange of knowledge and insights.

    Ivo Smits


From: Aileen Gatten <-----@umich.edu>
Date: July 13, 2006 23:58:57 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

    Here's another instance of "kakikudashi" for Latin.  Some years ago when I was doing some research in the manuscript room of the Vatican Library, a Latin professor also working there told me about a strange manuscript he was reading.  It was a medieval copy of poetry by Prudentius, and it had little marks by the words.  No one knew what the marks signified, but the "teisetsu" had been that they were musical notations.

    This professor instead suspected that the purpose of the marks was to rearrange the Latin into something that could be read more easily by a northern European, perhaps a speaker of German or Anglo-Saxon.  To judge from the reaction of other classicists who heard about this manuscript, marking a classical text in this way was unusual in medieval  Europe.  The professor was very interested to learn that the Japanese had a well-established system for reading Chinese in an approximation of Japanese syntax.

Aileen Gatten


From: David Pollack <-----@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 3:01:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

English-language kanbun textbooks have always seemed an odd waste of time to me since there are so many available in Japanese, but then I imagine that's how the entire subject has always looked to Chinese readers.

Besides the apparently now-standard Introduction to Japanese Kanbun by Akira Komai and Thomas Rohlich (1988), I don't know  if anyone has mentioned the earlier succinct Introduction to Kambun by Sydney Crawcour (1965). This work is no doubt long out of print, but as I recall it was well done, and according to FirstSearch it's still in 61 libraries worldwide.

Funny readings of Chinese texts aside, can someone recommend a manual on the awful genre of kana-majiri kanbun of the sort written by Japanese through the Edo period? It seems nearly everything important ever written in classical Chinese can be found in Kanbun Taikei <http://kanbun.info> and other collections in its three states of genbun, kundoku and gendaiyaku, but all those letters between Sengoku daimyo or chajin? Fugedaboudit.

David Pollack
University of Rochester



From: David Lurie <-----@columbia.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 4:27:44 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

As a weekly digest recipient, I hesitate to make what may be a belated or superfluous post, but I am currently completing a manuscript that addresses the phenomenon of _kanbun kundoku_ in detail, and can't help chiming in with a few scattered, hasty remarks about the recent discussion of this topic.

I've run across repeated references to notations in Latin texts (in Anglo-Saxon/English contexts) that sound very similar to kunten markings, although I have not yet been able to track down an actual example (if anyone knows of one I'd be most grateful to hear about it).  The interesting question about such markings is whether they were used to prepare a more-or-less independent translation (a variety of formats are imaginable), or 'on the fly' to make a reading in English of the Latin text, which would be remarkably close to kundoku.  There are other non-East Asian instances of kundoku-like practices in the world history of writing: Akkadian uses of Sumerian graphs have long been talked about in this connection, and I've recently seen some very interesting discussions of connections between Arabic and other languages in the context of Koranic studies--(tantalizingly mentioned in Michael Cook's The Koran: A Very Short Introduction).  And, as Prof. Tollini notes, in the 19th century the techniques were used by Japanese students reading alphabetic texts in European languages; these fascinating practices are discussed in Morioka Kenji's [森岡健二] Obun kundoku no kenkyu (Meiji shoin, 1999); Prof. Morioka recently published a nice summary of his research as "Obun kundoku shoshi" (Yuriika no. 35, April 2003).

The question of what Edo period (or earlier, for that matter) writers of kanbun "actually thought of what they were writing, in their heads" is a complex one, but a simple answer would be that for the most part, assuming they thought about it at all, they were writing Japanese; it might be more accurate to say that in general what they were writing did not have a stark linguistic distinction from texts written in kana or mixed kana and kanji.  It is true, however, that from the late Muromachi period this gradually became controversial in certain elite circles.  With increasing exposure to contemporary Chinese commentaries and other forms of scholarship, and eventually to vernacular Chinese publications (something that Emanuel Pastreich has written about extensively), proponents for the linguistic Chinese-ness of the kanbun medium emerged--Ogyu Sorai being the most famous of them.  But this was one side of a debate that continued into the Meiji period, with people like Hio Keizan [日尾荊山] on the other side, arguing for the priority of traditional kundoku practices in accordance with Japanese grammar.

I am convinced that from the mid-7th century on (essentially, from the beginning of widespread written communication in the Japanese archipelago), kundoku was the default method of reading (incidentally, it is increasingly clear that it developed first in the Korean states, perhaps as early as the 6th century).  As was mentioned in this thread, one prominent exception is the practice of 'bo-yomi' in Buddhist contexts, but students in the most elite curricula of the Nara university were required to learn current Chinese pronunciations for formal bo-yomi style readings of the non-Buddhist classics they studied--though even there it looks like kundoku served as an adjunct for those who were puzzling over what the texts 'meant.'  The other great exception is with kanshi poetry, where ondoku was extensively used (albeit also usually accompanied by kundoku) by reader/writers concerned about rhyme and tone (I believe Ivo Smits discusses this in the long two-part piece on the Wakan roeishu that appeared in Monumenta Nipponica several years back).

With apologies for an abrupt and probably belated post after a long silence---

David Lurie

===========================
David B. Lurie
Assistant Professor of Japanese History and Literature
Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures
Columbia University
www.columbia.edu/~dbl11


From: "Frederic J. Kotas" <-----@cornell.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 6:28:34 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

On the contrary, David, your comments are very interesting, and as you know, I am in general agreement with much that you write.  I have gone so far as to say that at many (most?) times in Japan's history, kanbun was simply another method of expressing the Japanese language, the writer thinking in Japanese and anticipating that his reader would read the text as Japanese.

Cornell recently hosted a young Korean scholar who worked with Prof. John Whitman, and who recently contributed to a book on Korean kundoku  (韓國 角筆 符號 口訣 資料 와 日本 訓點 資料 연구 :  華嚴經 資料 를 중심 으로).[note]  He was also quite familiar with the work on kakuhitsu markings (角筆) by Kobayashi Yoshinori (no, not the gômanizumu fellow), who, I am told, devised a machine to make them more readily detectable..  Prof. Whitman has been studying the Shosoin texts with kokunten that have made available with the publication--in color--of the Shôgozôkyôkan (聖語蔵経巻) .

Last year at a book dealers' flea market I discovered an early Meiji English language textbook..  In addition to providing "approximate" pronunciation with the use of kana, the author also provided kunten with the English text--for example, the kaeriten between verb and direct object!

Prof. Whitman and I are quite interested in the possibility of someday holding a different sort of "kanbun workshop," one devoted to kunten and kundokugo.  Any other interested parties?

Frederic Kotas
Japanese Bibliographer
Cornell University


> The hangul in the title of the book on Korean kundoku has come through in pieces. Here is the Webcat reference, with names of authors, etc.
http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/shsproc?id=BA67677807
and while I am about it, here is a book on kakuhitsu by Kobayashi Yoshinori 小林芳規: http://webcat.nii.ac.jp/cgi-bin/shsproc?id=BN01255410
-- ed


From: David Eason <-----@ucla.edu>
Date: July 14, 2006 10:13:06 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: North American Kanbun Studies?

On 2006/07/13, at 12:27 David Lurie wrote:

proponents for the linguistic Chinese-ness of the kanbun medium emerged--Ogyu Sorai being the most famous of them.  But this was one side of a debate that continued into the Meiji period, with people like Hio Keizan [日尾荊山] on the other side, arguing for the priority of traditional kundoku practices in accordance with Japanese grammar.

 Concerning the two contrasting positions represented by Ogyu Sorai and Hio Keizan, as well as many of those in between, there is a recent article by Aihara Kousaku entitled "Joji to kobunjigaku: Ogyuu Sorai seijiron josetsu" and published in  Toukyou toritsu daigaku hougakkai zasshi in early 2004 that deals with this and other related issues.  For those interested, the full citation in Japanese is -

相原耕作 「助字と古文辞学:荻生徂徠政治論序説」『東京都立大学法学会雑誌』第四十四巻 第二号(二〇〇四年一月)

  As the title suggests, the article focuses on how scholars - particularly Sorai, and to a lesser extent, Dazai Shundai - argued over how to understand the sentence final characters in Chinese texts such as 哉 and 焉, as well as what to do with them when reading these texts in kakikudashi order.   But even more interestingly, the article explores many scholars divided positions on the proper way  of appropriating Chinese texts through either onyomi or kunyomi readings and the ongoing issue of how best to come to an understanding of certain grammatical points in Chinese that could not be easily addressed through translation.

  In truth, however, I am not the one who should be providing a summary for this or any related research.  My own research focuses on Sorai's military thought rather than his writings about specific reading practices.   Still, as I was given a copy of the above article by the author a few years back while I was living in Tokyo and able to regularly show up to meetings of the monthly Ogyu Sorai kenkyuukai, I would recommend that those with an interest in this issue might wish to take a look at this particular article as an informative addition to this ongoing discussion.

Best,

David

-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
-----ucla.edu


From: Thomas Howell <-----@earthlink.net>
Date: July 14, 2006 10:19:23 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun

Michael Pye wrote:

2) Was this (if true) always the case? I have long been tortured with worry
about how eighteenth century writers of kanbun actually thought of what they
were writing, in their heads. If there was a time when literati thought
(sometimes) in the Chinese order, when did it start and stop?

Another way to approach this question, and borrowing from Ivo Smit's anecdote, is this: Did it bother a writer of kanbun that he couldn't express "Close the door" in kanbun,  in the way he might say it? Did the distance between the forms and words used in writing, and vernacular speech, bother him or her?

Suppose this writer thought: if I go a day's journey in any direction, and say to someone," Close the door," in my vernacular, there's a good chance they won't understand me. What is stable and universal is not the vernacular, or a form of writing that tries to imitate the vernacular, but my own kanbun. When I think of everyday things, these may come out in speech, but if I want to make an argument on deep and profound matters, naturally that comes out in kanbun.

In other words, they wouldn't necessarily have to be used to a type of thinking closest to speech (or Japanese word order), as being more natural than the thinking formed by writing-- in the style of writing they were used to write in.

Tom Howell

From: David Eason <-----@ucla.edu>
Date: July 15, 2006 11:26:42 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun

  While I fear that my previous posting about Ogyu Sorai and kanbun may have resulted in a substantial decrease in interest towards this ongoing thread, I still cannot resist posing a few more questions and comments in response to Tom Howell's most recent post.

   I have to admit that I do not quite understand the seemingly clear distinction that is being proposed between the act of saying  "Close the door" in the vernacular versus writing it down in kanbun.  My inability to grasp this point stems from a basic doubt.   Namely, do we know how "Close the door" or any other number of utterances might sound when spoken as compared to how they would have been expressed in writing?  Or to rework and expand the question -  during various historical periods, how do we know that many of the elements within the system of written kanbun were not also a part of a larger oral culture and vice versa?

   Certainly in terms of grammar and syntax there are and were many differences between kanbun and the spoken language, and I am not suggesting that individuals spoke in some sort of unadulterated kanbun as they went about their daily lives.  However, on the other hand, I am also not comfortable with the suggestion that one can posit a clear and unproblematic break between these two forms of communication, assuming that kanbun was somehow less capable of conveying everyday actions and ideas.   For, on the contrary, at least in those texts I have come across during my research into 16th and 17th century conflict the issues addressed by those writing in kanbun would seem to be very much a part of the everyday.

  This ability to express everyday actions and ideas seems to have been facilitated, at least in part, by the incorporation of quite a bit that was not strictly "Chinese" into the written medium of kanbun.  For unlike the example sentences provided throughout the Rolich textbook that was mentioned in a previous post, very few actual texts from the sixteenth century were written exclusively in Chinese characters.  Rather, as a quick glance over Oda Nobunaga's letters or any volume of collected sources such as the _Sengoku ibun_ will quickly demonstrate, most 16th century kanbun correspondence also employs a liberal amount of kana interspersed throughout.   And while can hardly seem anything other than "atarimae" when repeated to an email list full of experts, this obvious point also leads to another, perhaps less frequently mentioned issue.  Namely, that together with the use of kana, many sixteenth-century texts also include words and phrases that are, in fact, drawn from specific regional dialects.  To take but one example, recent research has shown that during the middle and late sixteenth century the Mouri family often employed specific words found only in their local Chuugoku regional dialect within compositions written in otherwise unremarkable kanbun.

   For this reason I am highly skeptical that the act of writing in kanbun, at least in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, represents an engagement with language  either completely removed from or in strict opposition to the vernacular.   At the very least, the above example of the Mouri family demonstrates that when writing in kanbun one did not automatically exchange one's particular, local dialect for a completely separate and universally accessible alternative mode of communication.

This leads me to wonder then how one might begin to conceptualize the complex relationship between written and oral language in the sixteenth century, as well as during earlier and later times.  Historians of medieval Europe have increasingly taken up such issues as part of a larger exploration into daily practices, discussing the way in which oral culture shapes, as well as is shaped by, interaction with the written word.    Is there similar work written by historians of "medieval" Japan?  I have a few books recently published by Japanese scholars that address some of these issues, but the literature on this topic still seems to be quite sparse.   Any suggested readings?

David

-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
-----ucla.edu


From: Richard Bowring <-----@cam.ac.uk>
Date: July 16, 2006 18:33:41 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun again

On the matter of Latin texts, which both Gatten and Lurie brought up, a friend working in Romance languages tells me that if you are interested you should investigate writings by Professor Roger Wright of Liverpool University, who has been working on the break up of Latin into the vernaculars. There are texts with diacritics etc that would look like Latin to us but if we heard the stuff read out in the Middle Ages (pre 9th/10thc.) we may well have heard something that we would clearly classify as a Romance language, not Latin. This is, of course a controversial topic. Note that although it might well involve transposition of elements it involves Romance languages, not Germanic, and so charts a process of change rather than translation per se. I suspect that this is rather different from kanbun kundoku, which involves two utterly different languages and only really works as a method of translation because of the nature of the Chinese script and the special relationship between Japanese and Chinese. I could imagine a kundoku method for construing Latin that marked it with numbers for word order or did what linguists do now and interpolate signs like "obj, sub, vb, part[icle]" when quoting uncommon languages, but in the end it is surely easier just to learn Latin grammar, particularly if you have to compose in Latin as well, which is what I had to do in England aged 12 in the late 1950s.
What a pity the Koreans, who undoubtedly invented the system, were so careless as to lose it!
Richard Bowring


From: Nobumi Iyanaga <-----@nifty.com
Date: July 17, 2006 11:13:23 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun

Hello,

On Jul 13, 2006, at 11:58 PM, Aileen Gatten wrote:

       Here's another instance of "kakikudashi" for Latin.  Some years
 ago when I was doing some research in the manuscript room of the
 Vatican Library, a Latin professor also working there told me about
 a strange manuscript he was reading.  It was a medieval copy of
 poetry by Prudentius, and it had little marks by the words.  No one
 knew what the marks signified, but the "teisetsu" had been that
 they were musical notations.

       This professor instead suspected that the purpose of the marks was
 to rearrange the Latin into something that could be read more
 easily by a northern European, perhaps a speaker of German or Anglo-
 Saxon.  To judge from the reaction of other classicists who heard
 about this manuscript, marking a classical text in this way was
 unusual in medieval  Europe.  The professor was very interested to
 learn that the Japanese had a well-established system for reading
 Chinese in an approximation of Japanese syntax.

This reminds me an interesting story about professor Etienne Lamotte
(or, perhaps, it was about prof. Louis de La Vallee Poussin?  I don't
remember very well), the well known Belgian scholar of Buddhist
studies.  Anyway, the professor was so versed in Sanskrit that he was
reading Chinese Buddhist texts translating them into Sanskrit (then,
translating from Sanskrit to French); he didn't know at all what mean
the kunten marks in Chinese texts (edited in Japan).  Someone asked
to him what mean these marks, and he replied: They are no important
for meaning; they should be marks for chanting the suutras in Japan...

Best regards,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan
From:  Judith Froehlich <-----@swissonline.ch>
Date: July 18, 2006 16:21:30 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  kanbun

David Eason wrote:
... the literature on this topic still seems to be quite sparse. Any suggested readings?

I did not plan to make advertisement for my own book. But this seems an opportunity.

Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no sho, 1004-1304. Bern/New York: Peter Lang (in print)

The central argument of my book is that in Japanese medieval society with a limited literacy the dissemination and reception of texts took place primarily through speaking and hearing. At least professional scribes did not have any difficulties to convert oral statements into kanbun and vice-versa to vocalise kanbun texts.

Some of my referees and anonymous readers found the idea of the importance of orality and "vocality" in medieval Japan nonsense. But even if one shares their opinion, my book contains a bibliography of Western and Japanese works on the topic of orality and literacy with reference to medieval Europe and Japan up to around 2004.

Judith Froehlich


From: Thomas Howell <-----@earthlink.net
Date: July 19, 2006 2:36:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: kanbun

On Jul 18, 2006, at 12:21 AM,  Judith Froehlich wrote:
Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no sho, 1004-1304. Bern/New York: Peter Lang (in print)

This looks very interesting. Thank you!

Also:
 Yamada Shunji, Moji bunka to shite no ondoku to mokudoku (221-43), in Onsei to Kaku koto, Vol 8 of the series, Souzou suru Heian bungaku.

Although the starting point here is the Genji, and there is nothing about the Edo period,  in the later sections of this essay Yamada summarizes the state of the field on silent versus oral reading in Japanese scholarship. including the Amino essay I mentioned, Maeda Ai, etc.

 Tom Howell


From: "Kristina Troost" <-----@acpub.duke.edu
Date: July 19, 2006 5:14:28 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: kanbun

Dear Judith,

I have been unable to find any reference to your book in the US bibliographic databases (Worldcat and RLG) and could not find it on the Peter Lang site either.  Since most of the books on the Peter Lang site are published in German, I wonder if the title below is a translation from the German, or if it was written in English.   I tried both author and title searches, but mostly author.  If it was published in German, that would explain why libraries in the US don't hold it.  I also found no holding libraries in Japan, though NDL is presently down.  It sounds very interesting; could you provide a more complete citation?

Thank you,
Kristina Troost

From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de
Date: July 19, 2006 16:44:20 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun again

Dear Colleagues,

I have been fascinated by the different ways in which this complex of problems
has been aired. I have learned a great deal. Thank you.

My first, and most serious question was whether there was ever a time when Japanese literati really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese, i.e. (leaving aside variations in the pronunciation) in the straight order of the Chinese characters, following the Chinese grammar and that alone. Taking all the learned contributions into account, I am coming to the conclusion that there is just no evidence that this was ever so. Indeed, the literati probably never even aspired to it. Perhaps some "kogakusha" did, but by then it was too late, since they were inevitably influenced by the other modality and thus the attempt could amount to little more than pretentiousness (as criticised by Tominaga Nakamoto in Okina no Fumi). Would anybody care to dispute this (and I"m very willing to be instructed) or is this the conclusion I should draw?

It has even been suggested (Tom Howell) that dialectic variations the orality of Japanese are a more interesting subject anyway, which somehow reinforces my suspicion.

A second comment:
Tom Howell wrote:
"Suppose this writer thought: if I go a day's journey in any direction, and say to someone," Close the door," in my vernacular,  there's a good chance they won't understand me. What is stable and  universal is not the vernacular, or a form of writing that tries to  imitate the vernacular, but my own kanbun. When I think of everyday things, these may come out in speech, but if I want to make an argument on deep and profound matters, naturally that comes out in kanbun!

I was very impressed by the last sentence which Tom Howell puts into the mouth of an imaginary writer, and since then I have been trying to make this attitude my own (!!!), so far without success alas, no doubt due to the insufficient profundity of my thoughts. It would be nice to think of something so deep and profound that it "naturally" came out in kanbun!!! (smiles).

They couldn't/wouldn't think "please close the door" in kanbun in pre-modern Japan, because they didn't have doors. But other simple actions or commands could theoretically be expressed in kanbun, I think. At the same time, I suppose the kanbun used to express the more profound thoughts would be (was) comparable in quality to the English which just naturally comes out of the mouths of people all over the world today when "they want to be understood" at conferences etc., i.e. rather varied...

Third, the Latin parallel.
I'm fascinated by the details provided about the annotation of Latin in Europe, which has to be a significant parallel, if partly for contrastive purposes. The examples show that people have felt a need for aids since mediaeval days and thus that the idea of a kakikudashi system is not entirely new. New for the European tradition would be to learn things from the very effective Japanese system, and start again.

The first phrase in my very first Latin book was "Discipuli picturam
spectate", - a late pedagogical formulation by a non-Roman. From this simple sentence we learn that pupils are not necessarily disciples and that word-order in English and Latin is not the same. This was back in the early fifties, mentioned by Richard Bowring (and indeed I too, in the language stream, composed prose and verse in Latin as a duty, and somehow a pleasure when compared with the rougher sports which were obligatory). However the great majority of modern people in the European cultural tradition have never learned to write in Latin (and of course like most of the few who still do/did, I have forgotten it myself). What I do remember, however, is that the prose of Tacitus, for example, is notably more complex than that of "easy" authors such as Livy or Cicero, so that his history sparkled more, while the poets and playwrights have their own vagaries. For these reasons I'm not quite convinced that just learning Latin grammar, and then reading, as Richard Bowring suggests, is quite so satisfactory an answer as it may seem in brief. What about all the other aids to the elucidation of texts in foreign languages? why not just learn the languages and forget the aids? Of course many people nowadays jump this stage for Latin anyway and take comfort in the excellent kokuyaku which all those Classicists have gone to the trouble of making for us, knowing that so few will take the originals with them to the beach. But a kakikudashi system would leave people nearer to the original vocabulary, while being assisted with the syntax. That's the main point. By the way, I haven't thought out just what it might look like (before anybody asks) as I'm too busy with other uncompleted tasks. Maybe if I ever make it to a beach, which seems more and more unlikely...

Lastly, parallels with modernity: The point about the interpretative function of reading aids (noted especially for the Buddhist context) is well taken, and as everybody knows, furigana are used to this day not only to indicate pronuncation but in some cases to add something a little bit different to the original. So there's nothing new/old in that. It's simply yet another indication, especially when katakana are provided for English words, that nobody really cares about the original words very much, only about the meaning - or a new meaning.

Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan


From: Robert Borgen <-----@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 5:18:40 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun again

Dear Colleagues,

I've been reading everyone's comments with great interest, even though only a few (some sent to me directly) have called my attention to North American activities that I can report at my upcoming conference.  Although I felt I ought to ought contribute to the ongoing discussion, I didn't have much to say until I read Michael Pye's comments, which offered a convenient review of some key points.  His first point was to propose that Japanese never really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese and asked if anyone was willing to dispute this.  I am, albeit with many of the qualifying words that composition teachers, at least here in America, tell us to avoid.

If you read the sections of the Yoro codes prescribing the pedagogical procedures for the court university, you will learn that Japanese students began their studies under a "Professor of Phonetics" (or maybe "Chinese Pronunciation" would be the more accurate translation of "on-hakase" or, tellingly, "koe no hakase).  At least in the Nara period, these professors appear to have been all Chinese.  After students had learned to "read" a text, they attended lectures on its meaning.  Ryou no Shuuge provides a series of comments on what "read" meant (p. 449 of the Kokushi Taikei edition).  The first tells us it means "hakudoku" ("white-reading"), which I would have guessed means to read a text out in the straight in the Chinese word word.  I was surprised to discover, however, that the term appears in Morohashi only as a modern Chinese word meaning something like "read to no avail" ("munashiku yomu").  My old Kokugo Daijiten says it means to read without paying attention to meaning and then cites the same passage I just cited myself.  Given the context, I still think it probably means something like "make an attempt at reading--probably aloud--a text using something resembling Chinese pronunciation--and probably memorizing it, since on their examinations students were to be shown a copy of the text and asked to provide a few characters that have been omitted."  Other commentaries, however, say that "read" means, well, "read-read" for want of a better translation of "dokukun" (i.e. the familiar "kundoku" with the characters reversed).  That word does not appear in the dictionaries I have at hand and so I have no idea whether or not it refers to what today we call "kundoku," but I suspect not.  According my Kokugo Daijiten, the earliest example of "kundoku" in its now familiar meaning apparently dates from the Bunmei era (1469-87).  In other words, we should not jump to the conclusion that in the ninth century (or perhaps even earlier since I do not know the date of the commentary cited in Ryou no Shuuge) "dokukun" meant the same thing as the modern "kundoku."  In the mid-ninth century, Sugawara no Michizane had a teacher who appears to have been Chinese, suggesting that the rules prescribed in the codes may have been still followed at that time and he may have been taught to read out and memorize Chinese texts in something resembling Chinese pronunciation (further details appear in my book).  Such evidence is more suggestive than conclusive, but at least it leaves room to question the conclusion that Japanese never read kanbun texts as Chinese.

This leads me to a related issue.  I suspect my hosts a Nishogakusha University would be surprised at the direction taken by this discussion, which has focused largely on the issues internal to Japan and the problem of how the Japanese conceived and read kanbun, leading to Michael Pye's proposed conclusion.  The assumption of most postings seems to be that "kanbun" refers to things that the Japanese wrote using only Chinese characters (but probably construed as Japanese).  At least among American scholars, the term does appear to have taken on that meaning, but not in Japan.  If one were to follow David Pollack's suggestion and get a Japanese introduction to kanbun, one would discover that most of the examples are taken from standard Chinese works--the Confucian classics, Tang poetry, and the like.  A few years ago, I had a chance to observe a high school "kokugo" class in Nobeoka, Kyushu, not a great cosmopolitan center.  The teacher happened to be doing kanbun that day.  I no longer recall what Chinese text she was teaching, but, in addition to giving the usual yomikudashi, she also did her best to read it out in modern Chinese pronunciation.  In other words, kanbun is broader, more cosmopolitan, than the discussion thus far might suggest.  Whereas Thomas Howell's comments point to the role of kanbun as a sort of domestic lingua franca for high-level written work, kanbun was also also used for international diplomatic and scholarly exchange.  Wang Zhenping's new book Ambassadors from the Island of the Immortals (UH Press) has some very interesting material on this topic.  Once I met a native Chinese scholar who, to my surprise, had read Michizane's kanshi.  He reported that most of it read quite nicely as Chinese and was good, although not great, poetry.  Nishogakusha's COE project focuses on Japan's own kanbun, it also has groups treating cultural exchanges between Japan and Korea, and between Japan and China.  It has hosted a symposium on the Analects of Confucius, a lecture on Six Dynasties Literature, and so forth.  In other words, I think we must resist the temptation to treat Japanese kanbun as simply strange way of writing the Japanese language.  At least for some Japanese, it was (and remains) a means of communication with the rest of East Asia.

Robert Borgen


From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 20, 2006 9:44:49 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun again

Dear Colleagues,

Very grateful to Robert Borgen for the fascinating additional information. She she (or sha sha!).

As I'm not a specialist in early Japanese culture I wasn't really trying to
propose a thesis, rather just asking whether it would be correct to draw a
particular conclusion from the contributions of those with greater knowledge. I learn that this conclusion should definitely be modified, but, - perhaps not very much! Robert Borgen's qualifying words are noted, but perhaps there should be more of them. The expressions "hakudoku" and "munashiku yomu" really say it all. Naturally in those early situations where there was a Chinese teacher (of pronunciation), the students would be following him (probably not her!) in reading through the text in an approximation to Chinese pronunciation (as used by the instructor: all those consonantal endings to syllables which lead to the -ku and -tsu endings in ondoku!) How else could all the vocabulary have been introduced into Japanese? But then came the next step. What did a given text "mean" if not "read vainly"? To know this, the text was not exactly "translated", it seems, but turned around so that it made sense in a head used to different grammatical patterns. So far, so good?

In RB's account we have references to things which are centuries apart.
I speculate that once the second step had become common, and all the key texts were provided with the right markings, the teachers learning from each other, and so forth, the first step was no longer necessary. In the Edo Period, the widely used Daigaku, for example, could be taught by means of the second step only (without Chinese teachers and without first reading it in the direct order of the kanji in some imitated but long since unrecognisable Chinese pronunciation). This new way of reading was a skill in itself which could only be taught by Japanese to Japanese. Chinese persons would find it incomprehensible and shake their heads in disbelief; like Sinologists wandering around in contemporary Japan with "kanji-shock"! Similarly, Japanese students today are baffled if you mention Da Hsue (?) or Sanjiaolun or Miaofalienhuajing.

I am speculating that the Japanese way of reading, and now I mean thought order as well as pronunciation, itself eventually became the basis, for Japanese writers, for composing texts using Chinese characters. (I'm talking about prose, not kanshi.) The question is, accepting Robert Borgen's instructive points about the earlier history, from when had this shift irreversibly taken place? (Or is anybody still saying that it never did?)

I realise that the in-between history is complicated by the fact that Buddhist monks went to China for considerable periods and learned Chinese all over again from their teachers, and also because written texts were used for diplomacy and trade and may have been read aloud now and then in mixed international company (but hardly on a daily basis, since they were on paper anyway and that's what counted). (Then there were Hideyoshi's soldiers who must have communicated with Koreans in kanbun before cutting off their ears as mementos (????).

One of the long-term results of this process is that Chinese texts
which have not been prepared for Japanese readers by specialists can nowadays only be accessed with difficulty and hence get ignored (like German texts in some North American libraries (smiles?)). In other words, there is a canon (or canons) of texts which have been learned and elucidated, and a whole lot more texts out there which nobody can make head or tail of, or only with great difficulty. And certainly nobody would dream of trying to read them with the help of modern putonghua.

This brings me to the concept of kanbun and kanbun textbooks. Robert Borgen's point about the contents of kanbun textbooks is absolutely right and important, if I may say so. In fact "kanbun" as a high-school subject is used as an introduction to classical Chinese language and culture. It is striking that, as far as I can remember (my books being elsewhere), Japanese kanbun texts are only marginally included in the textbook extracts (maybe some kanshi). This might seem odd, depending on viewpoint, in that so much writing important for Japanese history was itself written in kanbun. The Japanese term kanbun has to refer to both elements.

The balance tipping to Chinese texts in the kanbun school textbooks is like the balance in teaching Latin in Europe. That was always based entirely on classical Latin. Theological Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, Mediaeval Latin in general, Legal Latin, Medical Latin, Botanical Latin: all of this never got a look in while I did it at school (over seven years). It was as if it all never existed. At the same time the reasons for learning the "dead" language (with no attempt to pronounce it like Romans did) were always that it was the basis of European culture and that it made the learning of "other" languages easier (which always had to be postponed because we were so busy learning Latin, of course worthwhile in itself).

Back to kanbun in Japanese schools. It's very nice to hear that a teacher made a point of reading out a kanbun text using modern Chinese pronunciation. However, unless things have changed out of all recognition since I attended kanbun classes in the high school I mentioned before, this will have been an individual, and unusual educational initiative. In the sixties there was practically no knowledge of spoken Chinese in Japan. The first NHK programmes came in round about then and were quite good (not like the clown-about programmes they have nowadays), but hadn't had time to take effect. In the meantime some people have taken it up, and can of course travel in China. So it's very good and progressive that the teacher referred to by RB made the point in school. However I would be surprised if it's on the curriculum or mentioned in the guidelines for teachers. Moreover it was a kokugo class (says RB) rather than a kanbun class. Kokugo and kanbun courses are very independent of each other.

Robert Borgen writes:
" In other words, I think we must resist the temptation to treat Japanese kanbun as simply strange way of writing the Japanese language. At least for some Japanese, it was (and remains) a means of communication with the rest of East Asia."

I agree that we shouldn't regard the character of Japanese kanbun as "simply a strange way to write the Japanese language". (I don't think anybody has really quite been suggesting that.) However it does still seem that there came a point when those who read and wrote kanbun for themselves no longer did it with the straight kanji for kanji order in their heads. Or if so, it was only a part of what was in their heads. The language of Japanese kanbun was a literary language which was neither normal "Japanese", nor Chinese in the sense that its Japanese writers had "normal" Chinese in their heads. Did it not come to be so? And if it came to be so, would this not have come about, without people really noticing it much, sometime between the Heian Period and the Edo Period?

The ones who tried to turn the clock back were the kogakusha, who realised that there is more to kanbun than its mere intellectual contents (smiles)... I will conclude with a an ironic quotation from Tominaga Nakamoto (1717-1746), which I think (though it only touches on  pronunciation and not grammar) shows what a long distance had been travelled: "....Since meat is an important food in China the Confucianists should raise cattle and sheep for their consumption. Moreover the menu should be composed with reference to the chapter on 'Inner Rules' in the Book of Rites. At weddings...and at funerals... Similarly for clothes: they should wear Chinese costume and a Confucian hat on their heads... Confucianists should read Chinese characters in their Chinese pronunciation. Since there are various kinds of Chinese pronunciation they should copy the pronunciation of the state of Lu in the Chou period. Since there are many styles of Chinese characters, they should write with one of the most ancient styles." (Okina no Fumi 3)

As colleagues may well know, Tominaga was thrown out of school, probably for saying disrespectful things like this, but he went on to write his own kanbun which contrasts quite starkly with the quotations from Chinese Buddhist scriptures embedded in his work.

I see I am tending to propound a view now. But really, I'm just trying to
imagine the mental processes involved, the character of which does seem to have shifted over a lengthy period.

Would welcome any further instruction, but will try not to bore the list.
best wishes,

Michael Pye

University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto


From: David Eason <-----@ucla.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 10:51:19 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Varieties of Kanbun?

Dear All,

   This ongoing thread concerning kanbun has been extremely informative and I have learned quite a lot from all of the information and opinions provided by other posters.  I also wanted to thank both both Tom Howell for his reference to the Amino article as well as Judith Froehlich for mentioning her upcoming book.   This larger question of orality, though not the topic of the initial thread, is also an issue that I look forward to learning more about in the future.

  At present, however, I would like to tack on a brief addendum/clarification to my message from last week, particularly in light of Robert Borgen's most recent comments.  The teaching and recitation of kanbun texts through the medium of Chinese is certainly a point that should not be overlooked.  As the kanshi written by Sugawara no Michizane or even that written by a much later figure such as Arai Hakuseki reminds us, at least among the highly educated, kanbun allowed one to communication with an audience that extended beyond the boundaries of Japan.   I certainly did not wish to deny this important aspect of kanbun.   Rather, in my previous message I merely wished call into question the notion that written kanbun and a spoken, vernacular language were separate entities by default and relegated to separate existences with little or no bearing on one another.  Then again, perhaps no one was suggesting such a clearly demarcated binary in the first place...

   In any case, I should have taken more care to clarify terms when attempting to discuss potential points of overlap between formal writing and regional vernaculars.  For, in all honesty, after reading Professor Borgen's most recent post I am not certain if either he or the Nishogakusha's CEO project would even consider sixteenth-century texts which combine kanji and kana as qualifying as kanbun.   For although I have heard and seen this mixed style of writing referred to as a form of "hentai kanbun," turning to any number of dictionaries for a definition only complicates the issue further.  For example, the definition provided for "kanbun" in the _Koujien_ clearly includes such mixed kana and kanji compositions while in the _Nihon kokugo daijiten_ neither the entries for "kanbun" or "hentai kanbun" specifically mention this mixed style.   At any rate, it goes without saying that my previous post about words from regional dialects finding their way into kanbun only makes sense if one considers mixed kana and kanji texts a form of kanbun in the first place.

  And if I might continue with this point a bit further, there is another example concerning regional variations and vernacular language that may be of interest to those still following this thread.  There is some evidence that, at least during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there were ever so slightly different ways of reading certain parts of "kanbun" texts depending on the region in which one lived.  Now, it is unclear whether this reflects differences in dialect, differences in writing styles, or simply that all these individuals had a bad kanbun instructor :-), but there are enough surviving texts which include kana among the records of families such as the Go-Hojo to at least suggest that these deviations from "standard kanbun" were consistent rather than simply the result of occasional grammar mistakes.  As Yamada Kuniaki has pointed out, in the surviving records of the Hojo family as well as other warriors located in the Kanto region one finds patterns like -

「可申付候」and 「可被申候」

which one would expect to be read in yomikudashi as "moushitsukeru beku sourou" and "mousaru beku sourou" respectively, but which  instead appear consistently in kana as "moushitsuke beku sourou" and "mousare beku sourou" where the "ru" before "beku" is always dropped.   Apparently Hojo Soun and his successors would have failed high school kanbun...

Best,

David

-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
-----@ucla.edu


From: David Eason <-----@ucla.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 11:18:17 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Varieties of Kanbun? - Correction

As Yamada Kuniaki has pointed out, in the surviving records of the Hojo family as well as other warriors located in the Kanto region one finds patterns like -

「可申付候」and 「可被申候」

which one would expect to be read in yomikudashi as "moushitsukeru beku sourou" and "mousaru beku sourou" respectively, but which  instead appear consistently in kana as "moushitsuke beku sourou" and "mousare beku sourou" where the "ru" before "beku" is always dropped.   Apparently Hojo Soun and his successors would have failed high school kanbun...

 Actually, it's not a question of "ru" being dropped as I had mistakenly wrote at the end of my last message.  Rather, as Yamada himself explains, it appears rather that, for whatever reason, instead of conjugating shimo ni-dan verbs in the "u-dan" (saru, tsuku, etc.)  before "beshi" the Go-Hojo regularly used the "e-dan" (sare, tsuke) instead.

   Incidentally, the Mori family, despite incorporating words from their regional dialect into their letters,  consistently used the  "u-dan" before "beshi."  Clearly they would have done much better in high school kanbun than there contemporaries in the east. :-)

Best,

David

-----------------
David A. Eason
PhD Candidate, Early Modern Japan
Department of History, UCLA
-----ucla.edu


From: Robert Borgen <-----@ucdavis.edu>
Date: July 20, 2006 16:53:43 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Varieties of Kanbun?

David Eason is quite right:  my definition of both "kanbun" and "hentai kanbun" would be those found in Kokugo Daijiten and I'm startled to see that indeed Koujien's definition of "hentai kanbun" does include souroubun, which I had always thought was a variety of Japanese, perhaps because the only souroubun I've ever read is that appearing in noh plays, which seems very Japanese.  So, I checked Minegishi Akira's book, Hentai Kanbun, in which he states something like "In terms of its script, hentai kanbun can called writing that uses kanji exclusively," i.e. the definition I would have shared with Kokugo Daijiten.  However, he then goes on to write, "But this is only the general rule and sometimes various types of kana are also used," (again freely translated; see p. 109).  Defining our terms here is clearly a big problem.  I may prefer the narrower definitions, but I do not assume this prejudice is shared by the scholars at Nishogakusha.

To change the subject slightly, as I recall Roy Andrew Miller's book, The Japanese Language, states that Chinese was spoken in the Nara capital, but he doesn't give a citation for that claim.  If my recollection and Miller's book are both correct, they would support the view I presented earlier that in ancient Japan kanbun was more distinctly Chinese--and even oral--than it would later become.

And to change the subject yet again, Michael Pye commented that kanbun is not taught as part of high school kokugo classes.  I must confess I had thought the class I observed was a kokugo class, but I can't be sure and certainly am not up on guidelines teachers must follow in such classes.  I had assumed that the teacher was imitating the practice of NHK's early morning kanshi program (5:00 AM on the educational channel, last time I checked), which explicates a classical Chinese poem in Japanese and does have it read in authentic Mandarin, apparently by a native speaker of the language. 

And finally, about ten years ago, I picked up a book "Shinpen Jouyou Kokugo Benran," which was apparently intended as supplementary reading for high school students.  I got it for its lovely color pictures of such things as flowers mentioned in Kokinshuu.  After its chapters on modern literature (pp. 178-309), it has a brief section on major foreign writers, arranged by country:  England, France, Germany, Russia, America and finally China (pp. 310-12).  Whereas England and America each get 4 writers (the selection would surprise my colleagues in our English Department), only Lu Xun made the grade among modern Chinese writers.  But wait!  There's more!  The book concludes with a section on kanbun, complete with more lovely pictures and a few sample passages, all from the Chinese classics (pp. 314-376).  In other words, the books author's seem to think of modern Chinese literature as "foreign," but not classical Chinese literature, which gets a long section all to itself.  Japanese writing in kanbun rates passing mention in the chronological survey of Japanese literature (pp. 1-176).  Although I didn't count words, Japanese kanbun seems to get only slightly more attention than Lu Xun.  Rai San'you, for example, appears only in the nenpyou, which has an entry, "1836: Nihon Gaishi (Rai San'you)," to quote it in its entirety.  As I said, my impression would be that for most Japanese, "kanbun" is classical Chinese writing by classical Chinese authors.

Robert Borgen


From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 20, 2006 20:05:15 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Varieties of Kanbun?

Dear Colleagues,

Robert Borgen writes (in a kind of conclusion to his latest extremely valuable
mail):

"As I said, my impression would be that for most Japanese, "kanbun" is
classical Chinese writing by classical Chinese authors."

However, if you will excuse me saying so, I think is a little one-sided. Kojien is quite clear. There is (a) and there is (b). The first is classical Chinese prose by Chinese authors. The second is writing composed only in kanji, in "wagakuni", as opposed to kanamajiri.

The fact that today's kanbun textbooks for schools concentrate mainly on the first is neither here nor there. (Of course it's an interesting matter in
itself, as already discussed). However the other stuff is still lying about in
libraries and bookshops (I nearly said "exists", but didn't want to get
metaphysicians at my throat.) And there's a lot of it. To mention Tominaga Nakamoto again (excuse my limited information base), Okina no Fumi is written in kanamajiri (as in the title) and Shutsujokogo is written in the kanbun of wagakuni. No Japanese person could refer to it as anything other than kanbun. The same distinction can be made for much earlier writings like those of Buddhist leaders such as Shinran Shonin.

I still believe that there came a time when the Japanese syntax in the head came to dominate the kanji by kanji texts written in wagakuni, while the
kanbun form was retained (especially for profound thoughts!). But the question I can still only answer very vaguely is when this shift occurred. Perhaps it just can't be answered very well at all.

As the Sage said, any time remaining (after administration) should be spent in
study, and I know I have a lot to do.

Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan


From: "David Pollack" <-----@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 21, 2006 11:51:59 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun again and again and....

Re: the contemporary Japanese use of "kanbun" to communicate with other Asians, I venture (habakarinagara) to mention the example in chapter 11 of my book Reading Against Culture (Cornell UP, 1992) entitled "The Escape from Culture: Takeshi Kaiko's Into a Black Sun. The narrator, a Japanese journalist in Vietnam in the 1970s (who happens to be Kaiko), finds himself able to communicate in some depth with Vietnamese Buddhist monks simply by resorting to the kanbun he learned in high-school, and earns the trust of another Vietnamese by his ability to come up with the second couplet of a famous Tang Chinese quatrain after he is given the first. Because of this shared background, Kaiko finds himself able to see dimensions of Vietnamese lives that will always be tragically invisible to his Western colleagues. It makes one wonder what might remain today of this common Asian cultural fund -- it seems more likely they might get along by referring to anime.

Kyoushuku,
David Pollack
From:"I.J.Parker" <------@aol.com>
Date: July 22, 2006 3:09:41 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: kanbun discussion

As an outsider in this learned group I normally stay pretty quiet, though I follow the discussions faithfully. My interest in the subject is historical and cultural since I write about the 11th and 12th centuries.

I found the detailed discussion of the use of Chinese in ancient Japan fascinating and hope that my understanding of the subject is fairly accurate. It seemed to me that Chinese (whether it was the written form or also the spoken version) was reserved to upper class males, usually university-educated and government-service-bound. Exceptions, no doubt, existed (Lady Murasaki seems to have had a smattering of Chinese and hidden the fact for fear of censure) and one would assume that a very large number of people in the lower ranks of the government (scribes, clerks, etc) would have been able to decypher documents that applied to their jobs. Perhaps the latter needed to know only the Japanese equivalent of the Chinese original. Presumably that is then how kanbun entered into the written language and how perhaps certain class distinctions might have been attached to differing levels of knowledge of Chinese.

Perfectly spoken Chinese was most likely a rarity during the late Heian period and may have become even rarer later on. Professor Borgen's posts remind me that Sugawara Michizane was a fine poet of Chinese poetry.  My English translations suggest that it resembles original Chinese poetry in format and subject matter rather than Japanese poetry. Would one find such expertise in later centuries?

Please make allowances for my possibly foolish assumptions.

I.J.Parker

----------------------------------------------------
From: James McMullen <-------@oriental-institute.oxford.ac.uk>
Date: July 22, 2006 0:22:37 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun

The recent PMJS exchanges of opinion on the status of ‘Chinese’ or kanbun written by Japanese raise serious questions about how the extensive corpus of material written in that medium should be approached. Should it be regarded as essentially a special highly Sinicized variety of Japanese,as Japanese, or as  Chinese, albeit presumably sometimes  Japanicized, Chinese? This is not a new debate, but the question has not least a practical aspect, at least for translators. In the lastest PMJS, Michael Pye writes as follows:

“My first, and most serious question was whether there was ever a time
when Japanese literati really read and wrote kanbun texts as Chinese, i.e. (leaving aside variations in the pronunciation) in the straight order of the
Chinese characters, following the Chinese grammar and that alone. Taking all the learned contributions into account, I am coming to the conclusion that there is just no evidence that this was ever so. Indeed, the literati
probably never even aspired to it. Perhaps some "kogakusha" did, but by then  it was too late, since they were inevitably influenced by the other modality and  thus the attempt could amount to little more than pretentiousness (as  criticised by Tominaga Nakamoto in Okina no Fumi).”

My own view is that each scholar writing in  the medium of kanbun should be evaluated separately.  I also think that the intention of the author, insofar as it is accessible or can be inferred, should be considered. In the end, rigidly to apply the categories of ‘Chinese’ and ‘Sinico-Japanese’ or ‘Japanese’ may be unproductive or futile. There must be a continuum here; some variables, such as linguistic skill and authorial intention may help plot the position in any one case. Some scholars , especially those who edited their own texts with diacritics,  wrote a form of what  I think G.B. Sansom called ‘Sinico-Japanese’, rather than Chinese; their texts are basically  intended as Japanese, simply cosmetically rearranged on the page to look Chinese and to evoke the cultural authority of that language. But other scholars, perhaps a minority,  surely did write in what they thought of as Chinese, rather than any form of Japanese. Pace Michael Pye in the above quotation, contemporary sensitivity to Chinese and Korean  comments on Japanese writing in Chinese, together with the alacrity with which praise from that quarter was recorded, surely attest to the conscious will to write acceptable Chinese.

An instructive case in point must be Itoo Jinsai. Jinsai habitually left his texts as  hakubun  [in the sense of kanbun without diacritics] and  is said rarely to have added diacritics to his own writings. The linguistic status of Jinsai’s kanbun recently erupted into a minor controversy in connection with Jinsai’s  Go-Mou jigi , translated into English  by John Allen Tucker [Leiden: Brill, 1998]. This is a useful, fluent and readable version. But Tucker based his translation on the assumption that this was a Japanese text, even referring to the ‘original text in Japanese’.  In my review of Tucker’s translation [MN54, no. 4; winter, 1999], I took him to task. There was a serious question about the authority of the diacritics  on the published versions of Go-Mou jigi used in the translation; they cannot safely be attributed to Jinsai himself. The main reason, however,  was that I could not, and still cannot, get my mind round the fact that Jinsai  incontrovertibly presented his text formally as Chinese, rather than any form of Japanese.

In his riposte [MN vol. 55 , no. 2, pp. 331-33], John Allen Tucker robustly reasserted the  radical “Japanese” position.  “My response is, first, that there is no “Chinese” version of [Go-Mou jigi]. Jinsai wrote in kanbun, for a Japanese audience. Whether punctuated or not, kanbun is meant to be read as Japanese.”  [p. 331]. Especially in the light of the ambiguity of the term kanbun, I confess to finding this claim still puzzling.  But behind Tucker’s assertion, no doubt, is the view of  the Jinsai textual scholar Miyake Masahiko, who wrote in his study of Jinsai’s method of construing his own texts into Japanese: “So long as Jinsai conceived [his thought] in Japanese and expressed it in kanbun, it is necessary, especially with [Jinsai’s] various drafts, to take not just the kanbun  text  but also Japanese kundoku forms  as basic [to interpretation].’  This assertion, however,  also seems problematic; it in turn  begs the question of how it is possible categorically to recover Jinsai’s thought processes.  As a life-long reader of Chinese texts and a brillant linguist, why should he not have thought in Chinese?

If the intentional argument is to be applied to Jinsai, the evidence of the MS page itself surely suggests strongly  that he intended Chinese.  It is surely natural to read it and to translate on that basis. To read a text that survives in autograph  form in hakubun  versions only as ‘Japanese’ and on the basis of diacritics from another hand only circumstantially associated with Jinsai himself, seems perverse  and risky. The act of applying diacritics interposes another  translation. Moreover,  it invites potential misreading. Indeed, my review pointed to a  small number of such misreadings in Tuckers own version.

It is certainly true that some Jinsai texts were edited and diacritics supplied, most often by other hands. But this was surely for the benefit of his students.  Whatever concessions Jinsai allowed for them, however, he himself strove, in the opinion of Sinologists, with outstanding success, to write accurate, idiomatic, rhythmic  and stylish Chinese. The quality of the Chinese text evidently supports this. Please see the encomium of Yoshikawa Koojiroo on Jinsai’s achievement in this field in Jinsai, Sorai, Norinaga {Tokyo: The Toohoo gakkai, 1983; also NST, vol. 33]. The fact that Jinsai  almost certainly didn’t speak Chinese does not seem relevant.

But above all,  to read Jinsai’s  hakubun text as Japanese seems to defy common sense. A European contemporary such as Hobbes couldcommunicate his thought in either Latin or English. Maybe he formulated his ideas in English in his own mind first, though he may easily have thought in Latin. As with Jinsai and Chinese, this cannot be recovered. But Hobbes  communicated his ideas on occasion in Latin, on occasion in English. Even if he put his own Latin into English, how are we possibly to say that his original  Latin versions are really English?

As for Jinsai’s motives,  Michael Pye may be somewhat harsh is impugning  kogakusha with ‘pretensiousness’. Probably, like Sorai, Jinsai believed that to understand the Chinese sources of the Way authoritatively, one must master the language; and mastery included the capacity to reproduce it oneself.  Chinese carried high prestige; it was the language of moral authority. Jinsai had to demonstrate, maybe not least to himself, his mastery of it.

James McMullen
Oxford

----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 22, 2006 16:15:33 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun

Dear Colleagues,

I am most impressed by the plausibility of James MacMullen's assessment of Ito
Jinsai's extremely high ability and familiarity with "Chinese". And of course
the "intentionality" is important. What were writers themselves trying
to do? I quite agree (as a learner). But also, what were they able to do? Seeing
it as a continuum and allowing for some writers being closer than others to having
"Chinese" in their heads (phonetically and in terms of word order), is
no doubt the most perceptive approach. But how close were they, and others, to such a
state?

Your caveats, James (and by the way, hello! ..after a long time!) are
also quite significant, are they not?

My own question was/is not so much whether the result of compositional efforts
is better or less good, or seemed fine to other users of Chinese at the time,
but whether the mental processes really took place in the Chinese word order.
This may well be assumed by Chinese persons and by such foreign readers who
have themselves systematically studied classical Chinese and who just look at
the results of the authors' distinguished efforts as Chinese. But it may be
less obvious to others. Perhaps Ito Jinsai achieved thinking in terms of
Chinese word order, and represents one end of a wide spectrum.

By the way, I myself have never referred to anything written in kanbun as
"Japanese", - that's not my point (or my question), touching on your critique
of other authors. But the fact that this is disputed shows how difficult it is
to know what was going on. Hence I noted your caveats.

For one, I read:
It is certainly true that some Jinsai texts were edited and
diacritics supplied, most often by other hands. But this was surely
for the benefit of his students.
Exactly. But why did they need it? It's because no ordinary Japanese student
could conceivably sit down and just read a kanbun text in the Chinese order,
then any more than now. Moreover, correct me if I am wrong, by the Edo Period
they weren't being taught even to try.

Further:  "The fact that Jinsai almost certainly didn’t speak Chinese does not
seem relevant."
Well. It seems very relevant to me. It means that his profound thoughts didn't
just come out in kanbun by themselves, but that he constructed his prose. Of
course he will have had regular turns of phrase etc. which he didn't need to
think about, but for the rest, there will have been a more explicit thought
process. What does "he didn't speak Chinese" mean? Was it simply that he had
different, no longer quite "Chinese" pronuncations in his head for the kanji?
Or did it mean that he couldn't meaningfully "say" sentences in
kan(bun) in the order of the kanji?

But I do understand the result that
If the intentional argument is to be applied to Jinsai, the evidence
of the MS page itself surely suggests strongly that he intended
Chinese.  It is surely natural to read it and to translate on that
basis.
Indeed. Anything else can only be an aid, which may be amazingly useful, but
sometimes misleading.

Finally:
As for Jinsai’s motives,  Michael Pye may be somewhat harsh in
impugning kogakusha with ‘pretensiousness’.
Yes, but it's not so much what I personally impugne as how the approach of the
kogakusha came over to others in the period. (By the way, I originally wrote
"pretentiousness" - your typing slip (in quotation marks) had me a bit
worried!) Perhaps pretentious isn't the right judgement for us to make (it was
Tominaga Nakamoto's view). But, as you also suggested, they were trying to use
Chinese at least partly in order to impress, and not only because all the
discussions about statecraft and morals etc. were couched in it. Their sheer
devotion both to learning and to its contemporary applications is indeed
admirable.

People who take things really seriously may often seem to be pretentious to
others. For example, I have a personal campaign (completely ineffectual) to
teach British and Japanese people to say Beijing (rather than something like
Beizhing as in the BBC and Pekin (!) like Japanese news readers). Probably
people think this is just a bore, and quite "pretentious". But on the other
hand, given this borrowed, neo-colonial approach to pronouncing the
name of the capital of China, it's not surprising that contemporary Japanese
foreign policy is such a disaster...

best wishes,
Michael Pye
University of Marburg, Germany
Visiting Professor, Otani University, Kyoto, Japan

----------------------------------------------------
From: "Rein Raud" <------@helsinki.fi>
Date: July 22, 2006 19:08:48 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun

This is a very interesting thread indeed. But so far most of the discussion has focussed on texts written by Japanese authors. Could anybody point out any difference of reception between these kanbun texts and texts that had been imported from China and "domesticated" for Japanese use with diacritics, such as sutras, goroku etc? Whatever happened during the reading act, I'd still hesitate in seeing this domestication as a translation of a kind - rather, it would be comparable to adding vocalisation marks to Arab texts for the benefit of those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the Qur'an aloud. And it is also difficult to think that the Japanese authors' kanbun texts and originally Chinese texts would somehow seem to the same Japanese audience to be written in a different linguistic medium, if there is no evidence to the contrary.

With greetings,

Rein Raud

----------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Pye <-----@staff.uni-marburg.de>
Date: July 22, 2006 20:11:04 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun (Buddhist)

Dear Colleagues,

About Buddhist texts, which I wanted to mention for a long time:

Rein Raud <-----@helsinki.fi> writes:

Whatever happened during the reading act, I'd still hesitate in seeing this domestication as a translation of a kind - rather, it would be comparable to adding vocalisation marks to Arab texts for the benefit of those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the
Qur'an aloud.

The purpose is comparable, but the linguistic process is different. The
difference is simple but considerable: the word-order is changed. I would be
surprised if this happens with the Qur'an, where it is above all a matter of
getting the pronunciation right.

Further:
And it is also difficult to think that the Japanese authors'
kanbun texts and originally Chinese texts would somehow seem to the same
Japanese audience to be written in a different linguistic medium, if there
is no evidence to the contrary.

Agreed. Their intention was to write them in the same medium. The
results seemed to them to be in the same medium: kanbun.  The question is, given the
prevalence of the reading methodology, what was the writing methodology?

I am very interested in the relevance of this problem to Buddhist texts
because, to give an example relevant to some current work on pilgrimage, people recite
the Heart Sutra in the kanbun form, but they attend to its meaning in
explained forms. So the question in this case is, not so much how do they write
such texts (because they are a given) but how do they understand them when they
are recited in straight kanji order? That is, I'm interested in the intentionality of
religious acts in this case. People do come to understand these texts, partly
with the help of the explanations (and kokuyaku). But as far as the basic
kanbun form is concerned, the constant, ritualised repetition is necessary for
the meaning to be internalised, such that brief bits like shikizokuzeku
gradually become meaningful whereas at an earlier stage of learning and
Buddhist practice they were not. In other words the great majority of
people in Japan do not understand the Heart Sutra (or any other) because they have prior
knowledge of Chinese. Of course they don't have such knowledge. This will have
been true in pre-modern Japan as well as now.

(The parallels with the use of English today are many and varied, but
that's not pre-modern.)

best wishes,
Michael Pye
(Marburg/Kyoto)

----------------------------------------------------
From: Paul Rouzer <------@umn.edu>
Date: Jul 23, 2006 12:26 AM
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun and Chinese poetry


I felt that so much had been said on this posting that my own
contributions, such as they might be, would be unhelpful or extraneous.
But I thought I might stir the pot one more time by bringing up Chinese
poetry's place in this debate.

Most Japanese poets writing kanshi tended to write risshi, or so-called
"regulated verse." As I'm sure most of you know, there is a strong
tendency to make many of the couplets in risshi "syntactically parallel"
-- i.e., to place the same parts of speech in the same positions within
a couplet (along the lines of "flock of birds fly over the mountain;
herd of horses rush over the plain" and so forth). Kanshi poets are
quite capable of writing parallel couplets -- sometimes of breath-taking
beauty and sophistication, and grammatically far more complicated than
my trite example above.

What I find interesting is that kanbun rewritings of such couplets often
distort or violate the parallelism, even sometimes reinterpreting
individual words as different parts of speech than they would have been
if read as "pure Chinese". It may just be an issue of how one constructs
the kanbun syntax -- perhaps modern annotators are not paying attention
sufficiently to the parallelism to find a rendering that does justice to
it. But I think it quite likely that Japanese kanbun poets are, on some
level, "writing" and "reading" the poem as Chinese.

Of course, this then brings up even further complications. What does it
mean to "read" a Chinese poem? Is it possible to construct one almost
like a puzzle, conceiving of it as some device that conveys meaning, but
not necessarily a form of meaning analogous to that found in a poem in
Japanese (or even to that found in a passage of kanbun prose)? And
perhaps it should be remembered that even late imperial Chinese poets
wrote poetry based on tonal and rhyme categories that were already
obsolete in their contemporary speech -- so that Chinese poetry was in
China to a certain extent increasingly "artificial" from the 11th
century on.

I can't answer these questions -- though I am convinced that poets like
Rai Sanyou, who were well-read in contemporary Chinese poetry from the
continent, probably conceived of their poems in Chinese word order. I've
also found it interesting to note that Sanyou's poetry collection, as
published in his complete works in the 1930s, does not contain any
diacritics whatsoever.

Paul Rouzer
University of Minnesota

----------------------------------------------------
From: "pollack" <------@mail.rochester.edu>
Date: July 23, 2006 10:11:56 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun and Chinese poetry

My scattered experience of the history of the Japanese reading and writing of
kanshi, both by Chinese and by Japanese themselves, would seem to confirm the
oft-repeated observation that the syntactical parallelism of lushi/risshi
(sorry, I can't find diacritics on this borrowed pc) was, predictably, something
profoundly alien to Japanese aesthetic sensibilities, a matter I touched on in
"The Fracture of Meaning" (1986). I've always thought that educated Japanese
would have been perfectly capable of rendering Chinese parallel constructions
faithfully into Japanese if doing so hadn't made them sick to their stomachs.
Chinese requirements of end-rhyme and the use of flat/oblique tones, etc. were
of course never in question.

But I've also thought that Japanese learned in Chinese poetry would likely have
been familiar with the long Chinese practice of using parallelism (along with
the other inescapable and to the Japanese equally unappealing requirement of
lexical variety -- seen most clearly in fu or "rhymeprose," but when a
word/character is repeated in lushi and jueju/zekku it clearly signals a very
significant choice) as a heuristic device. That is, a lushi or pailu couplet may
often appear on the surface to follow the strict rules of syntactical
parallelism (this of course doesn't apply to the non-couplet jueju form, which
in effect uses only the first line of each couplet of a quatrain, whence its
name of "cut-off lines") even as it in fact has a subtly or very different
meaning, and in the best case of all the meaning is entirely ambiguous. Since
the Tang dynasty this practice was the very soul of poetic exchanges in
competitions and games among friends and sometimes among enemies (my 1976
dissertation dealt with this subject in the context of Chinese "linked-verse"
poetry, a subject suggested by the Japanese practice that may have been
influenced by it -- alas, I never followed up on this).

I now somewhat belatedly suspect that it was not the profound alienness to
contemporary Japanese life of classical Chinese verse alone that led Edo
Japanese to the practice of parodic kyoushi or "wild verse,"  as I had once
proposed in an old article, but may to the contrary have been the result of
their familiarity with the well-established Chinese practice of writing verse
that appeared to mean one thing on the surface and another or even opposite
thing at the same time. Some of this depended in Chinese on the lexical variety
I mentioned, since so many characters have multiple meanings in Chinese, often
depending on their context, their syntactical position, or the tone or reading
assigned to them. I would imagine that men of the learning of Rai San'you or
Itou Jinsai knew both how to produce a perfectly and blandly acceptable verse
when required by convention (those well-know handbooks like Santaishi), and how
to parody convention -- shall we be provocative and call it mitate? -- when the
circumstances were more unbuttoned.

I'm afraid I haven't thought about this issue for a long time and could be wrong
as rain about it. Since I'm currently in the middle of moving house, and have
other projects to deal with, I'm too busy (and I admit too lazy) to back these
proposals up with examples, which I promise to do in another incarnation.

With apologies,
David Pollack

----------------------------------------------------
From: Sean Somers <------@yahoo.ie>
Date: Jul 23, 2006 6:15 AM
Subject: [pmjs]  Kanbun (and everything after)

Dear List,

Of course, like many reading this latest series of
developments on the issue of kanbun, I have read
eagerly, but I have also avoided contributing directly
because of the issue at hand.  In short, I'm now
applying the customary caveat before I let loose my
typing fingers.

Prof Pye's comments have always caught my attention
and have sent me to the library on more than one
occasion, but I'd like to speak up on the possible
hazards of cultural comparison.  Earlier, kanbun had
been compared to Latin marginalia, with limited
success, IMO.  It was established, quite succinctly,
that kanbun is a unique product of the
inter-relationship of Chinese and Japanese, both
culturally and linguistically.

Now kanbun is being compared to classical Arabic.
Zitat von Rein Raud writes, via Prof Pye's message:
----
. . .during the reading act, I'd still hesitate in
seeing this domestication as a translation  of a kind
- rather, it would be comparable to adding
vocalisation marks to  Arab texts for the benefit of
those non-Arab muslims who needed to read the Qur'an
aloud.
----
I don't quite follow this, and I'm not sure how useful
these inter-cultural allusions are for our
understanding of kanbun.  The Qur'an is *always*
vocalised, whether it's for a native Arab speaker in
Yemen or a mosque in Hawai'i.  The classical Arabic
language transcends, as it were, dialect.  Indeed,
like the aforementioned journalist in Vietnam, a form
of 'literary' Arabic allows educated members of
different regions to communicate with one another.
However, Vocalisation is a necessary feature of the
Qur'an itself:  it is never optional.  The
presentation of the scriptures requires the vowel
markings, either as an independent text, or as cited
in a tafsir (commentary).  To not have these markings
would to have something that is not the Qur'an.  I
don't believe that I am overstating this  here.
Kanbun markings, however, and their purpose in syntax
or perhaps even pronunciation, is – as discussed – a
much more debatable matter.

And lest I seem like I am spliiting hairs -- really, I
am just a silly bystander who would like to
participate briefly in this exchange -- I'd like to
emphasise the point that the flexible conventions of
the genre seems to be the curious issue here in terms
of kanbun composition.  As the detailed messages have
indicated, the conventionality is further complicated
by the independent motivations of particular authors.

My wife studied kanbun as part of her high school
curriculum in Oita.  With few exceptions, her lessons
were almost entirely kanshi, Confucius, and the
classes seemed to be more of an introduction to
Chinese Classics.  Some emphasis was placed on
Yamanoueno Okura. I'm interested in, also, that Koamai
and Rohlich's textbook emphatically seperates their
definition of 'Japanese kanbun' as "the written
representation of the Japanese language in kundoku
style, not classical Chinese" (xiii).  In North
American, at least, many graduate seminars in kanbun
tend to make the same distinction.  That's not to say
this is somehow a standard to be universally followed,
but it does say something about contemporary pedagogy
of the issue.  (And this, to me, is an interesting
sub-discussion which can be traced back to this
thread's origins:  what selections are best for
teaching and introducing kanbun to graduate students?)
Out of curiosity, I re-read Soseki's 'Botchan', where
the officious teacher of Chinese Classics is
fleetingly referenced as an instructor of kanbun, as
well as Chinese literary classics.

The Qur'an must be presented in a certain way,
according to theological law . . . vocalisation is
required, but the actual recitation of the text has a
fair degree of adaptability (warsh style, etc); but it
seems to me that kanbun is entirely more flexible, in
terms of how the text is annotated, or how the genre
is emulated.

I thank you for your indulgence.
-Sean Somers
University of British Columbia

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From: "Rein Raud" <-----@helsinki.fi>
Date: July 23, 2006 13:57:08 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun (and everything after)

My purpose in comparing kanbun to vocalisation marks of Semitic alphabets was not to compare the cultural practices with their institutional background and its implications for the status of the texts, but the mechanic of the reading act. The Qur'an has to be read the same way at all times because of the status of the text, which most kanbun texts do not have. (There are many other vocalized texts beside the Qur'an in Semitic cultures, for which the rules are not so strict.) However, in both Semitic and kanbun cases we are dealing with a "core" text that is ambiguous (and, in the Chinese case, often initially meant to be so), and a "surface" text that can only be read in one "correct" way. For instance, the Wang Bi and the Wang Anshi readings of Daodejing chapter I would have resulted in different kanbun diacritics. (It would be interesting to know if there actually were differently domesticated versions of the same Chinese text in circulation at any time in Japan.) Anyway, if such variants existed, I'd still prefer to say we are dealing with variants of the same text regardless of how the diacritics have been applied (and the way to read the text aloud selected). But I concede that it is possible to argue that the read-aloud form of the text is primary, and texts without diacritics would be "homographs" of the multitude of readings, which can only be rendered adequately with the diacritics in place. As it seems, in the former case the text can be said to be in Chinese, in the latter, in Japanese.
 
Greetings,
 
Rein Raud

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From: Thomas Howell <------@earthlink.net>
Date: July 23, 2006 23:35:54 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Re: Kanbun

On Jul 22, 2006, at 12:15 AM, Michael Pye wrote:
 It's because no ordinary Japanese student could conceivably sit down and just read a kanbun text in the Chinese order, then any more than now. Moreover, correct me if I am wrong, by the Edo Period they weren't being taught even to try.

I looked again at Maeda Ai's essay, Kindai dokusha no seiritsu, which has been translated by James Fujii as "From Communal Performance to Silent Reading: The Rise of the Modern Japanese Reader." In part 2 he describes how "children of former samurai and wealthy and powerful families" in early Meiji were trained to read Chinese classics, beginning at the age of 5. He calls this (or Fujii translates it as ) "performative recitation" (roushou). This training began at home and was afterwards pursued in juku schools. Maeda Ai does not describe how the Chinese text was read, but I assume it was in Chinese word order without any voiced kunten. This was "sodoku," reciting and repeating the sounds to memorize the passage, without yet understanding the meaning. The reciting was done very loudly, Ai cites a newspaper article which complains of the noise students made at night doing this "reading."

Ai (I'm copying Fujii here) concludes: " The sound-reading of the Chinese classics -- wherein the repetition of the rhythms and the vibrations of the voiced words creates a kind of 'spiritual language' [seishin no kotoba] that is radically different from everyday Japanese --represents a form of instruction that imprints the very form of the Chinese language [kango no keishiki] on the souls of these youth. Even if comprehension of meaning appears beyond reach, the material qualities of the words, their resonance and rhythm, are fully mastered, and the understanding that is attained through reading, explication, and reading groups [rindoku] when the students have matured adequately supplements their grasp of these texts."

He goes on to say this reading, with its commutarian ethos,  since it was often done in a group, fostered a "community of intellectual elites" that cut across other social boundaries.

Now, whether this means anyone thought in Chinese word order after this training, or freely and spontaneously wrote their kanbun without using kunten as a mental aid, is obviously too big an assumption to make. But at least one can surmise those who underwent this training did not think of untranslated Chinese prose as "unnatural," and a select few, based on their early training, might indeed have read and written kanbun, or Chinese texts, with the "resonances and rhythm" they learned as children.

Incidentally, Ai gives Tayama Katai's memoir, My thirty years in Tokyo (Tokyo no sanjuunen) as an example. Tayama, in a chapter entitled Dokusho no koe, recalls as a boy walking on the road by the juku school, Houkou gijuku, which his older brother attended, and hearing the sound of the voices spilling out of the upper floor windows, wishing he could join them.

 Tayama concludes: "As for the Chinese studies juku school (kangaku no juku) my older brother went to, there were a number of such schools, including the Doujinsha of Nakamura Kei'u, and the Nishou (2 pines) gakusha of Mishima Chuushuu. Of the students of that period, there were any number who made their sword handles rattle, and argued over the affairs of the world. They made a point of going about in ragged clothes and with dishevelled hair, and they particularly despised anyone with a slight touch of the feminine -- shifun(=cosmetics) no ki ni chikazuku mono wo iyashinda. The Houkou gijuku was famous for teaching the Eight houses literature in sodoku, and the instructor...had once been an assistant lecturer at Shouheikou (Confucian academy founded 1690)."

 (Eight Houses referring to a grouping together. first in a Ming compilation, of Han yu and Liu zongyuan of the Tang, Ou yangxiu. Wang anshi, Zeng gong, Su xun, Su shi, Su zhe of the Song).

Tom Howell

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From: "James M. Unger" <-----@osu.edu>
Date: July 29, 2006 7:29:16 GMT+09:00
Subject: [pmjs]  Relationship of kanbun (text) and Japanese (language)

My guess is that most people who used kanbun in the Edo period did so in a way cognitively similar to the way many educated Europeans of the 18th and 19th centuries used Latin.  Few but schoolboys uttered more than phrases in it aloud.  If they did, their pronunciation typically mirrored theur L1 pronunciation of loanwords from Latin.  Hardly anyone conversed in it, as they often did in French, German, or some other L2. 

Think of Gauss.  He probably did not approach the task of writing his papers in Latin as translation from German, but rather like setting down music:  just come up with the prescribed combination of symbols and Latin sentences needed to get the ideas down on paper.  Eventually, he switched to German in his publications.  Whether he did so because he felt writing in Latin was a waste of time, because he felt the number of Latin readers was declining, or because his editor told him to switch, I don't know, but unless you believe he started back-translating from Latin to German he obviously was not dependent on "thinking in Latin" to do his work! 

My larger point is that if someone wants to challenge a conjecture like this, they need to supply comparative historical evidence showing how, say, the way Ito Jinsai learned or used kanbun was different from the way Gauss learned or used Latin.  Autograph manuscripts without yomikudashi marks don't prove much unless one can show that almost all other contemporary kanbun writers seldom if ever omitted them. 

Jim Unger
Ohio State

P.S.  I would be skeptical of any theory of kanbun that assumes kanbun texts instantiate meanings independently of their being read in some language or other.  Also, "knowing L2" is more than a binary feature or even a continuous one-dimensional variable.  There are obviously many differences, cognitive and practical, between Conrad's English and Gauss's Latin.  We ought to look at many perspicuous examples of "high culture" L2 usage from around the world before zeroing in on kanbun. 

----------------------------------------------------
From Michael Watson <-----@k.meijigakuin.ac.jp>
Date: July 29, 2006 11:59:29 GMT+09:00
Subject: pmjs]  Kanbun (and list update)

I'm not trying to have the last word on "kanbun" but I have now finally been able to locate an online copy of Sydney Crawcour's _Introduction to Kambun_ (1965), mentioned by David Pollack and still very much in use, it seems--included, for example, in David Lurie's syllabus for his autumn course at Columbia on kanbun!

 For those of you without a copy in a local research library, the whole text can be read online or downloaded as a PDF file (7 mb), thanks to the Center for Japanese Publications, University of Michigan:
http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/b/bib/bibperm?q1=akz7043.0001.001
http://www.hti.umich.edu/c/cjs/images/akz7043.0001.001.pdf
The online text is searchable, except for the handwritten kanbun examples which are rendered graphically. The PDF version consists entirely of images, it seems.

Michael Watson

----------------------------------------------------
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pmjs site: http://www.meijigakuin.ac.jp/~pmjs/